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Archive for Tyranny

I hadn’t seen this friend for years when I ran into him recently at the mall. “The end is near,” was the first thing he said.

I didn’t know if he was talking about ISIS or if he thought we’re all going to float away due to a planetary heating that’s irreversible and catastrophic.

Happily, he was only referring to a calendar.

“Upstairs in the calendar store, a few doors from Victoria’s Secret,” he explained, “there’s a good Obama countdown calendar.”

I went upstairs to look for a whole store devoted exclusively to calendars. It’s funny how entire shops are now specializing in fewer and fewer things. If edible pot is legalized in Pennsylvania, I won’t be surprised if we end up with a “High as @(%!” marijuana candy store in the local mall that carries only one item — “Mary Jane and Blunt, America’s best white chocolate polar bear couple.”

In any case, right between the dog calendars and wartime calendars featuring American military jets was the “Yes, the end is near” Obama calendar – “The out-of-office countdown, 2016 through the glorious end! January 20, 2017,” featuring some of President Obama’s most memorable policy and ideological declarations:

“There is no better way for the GOP to position itself for the 2016 election than to show the country two things. One, that now that it controls the House and the Senate…they are able to enact agenda. They have an agenda. And they should be willing to pass whatever they can and to dare the president to go ahead and to veto.”

Krauthammer said he believes that President Obama would sign some of the legislation passed by a Republican Congress, including trade negotiating authority, which Obama wants. “They should do that, give the president a win and a victory.

“But then they should begin to work on stuff and challenge the president — Keystone Pipeline, tax reform, repealing the medical device tax, repealing the employer and individual mandates in health care reform. Let the president show where the party stands and let the country know that with a new president, a Republican president, this stuff, which is very popular, will be able to get through.”

The 223 – 189 vote came after an initial attempt at a border supplement failed to make it to the floor Thursday due to lack of support.

Late-night meetings and tweaks to the original bills found members emerging from a Friday morning House GOP conference meeting expressing optimism about the prospects of passing a supplemental border bill to help alleviate the ongoing crisis of unaccompanied minors and family units illegally crossing the southern border.

The GOP victory comes after conservative House members pressed hard for changes tightening up the initial bill that failed to come to the floor Thursday due to lack of support.

A bill targeting President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is now set to be brought to the floor following the border supplement. Many Republicans have pointed to the presidents’ DACA program — which shields certain illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation — as inciting the flood of illegal immigration.

Since October more than 57,000 unaccompanied minors — the vast majority of who are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala — have been detained illegally crossing the southern border into the U.S. forcing the federal government to scramble for additional resources to cope with the influx.

Earlier in the summer, President Obama requested $3.7 billion to deal with the ongoing crisis. The supplemental appropriations bill the House GOP passed Friday night would supply $694 million to deal with the crisis — including providing additional funding to states to deploy the National Guard — and “fixes” a 2008 trafficking law that has made removing unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico difficult.

“Our plan reallocates $694 million to secure the border, provide emergency care, and prevent future arrivals,” House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said after the vote. “This will ensure that children are reunited with families in their home countries. Our solution addresses the problem humanely, effectively, and expeditiously. The crisis at the border demands our attention. It demands our action. And it demands our immediate and unwavering leadership.”

The legislation is unlikely to go much farther, however. The Senate left for August recess this week after failing to pass a supplemental border bill and President Obama slammed House Republicans Friday for “trying to pass the most extreme and unworkable versions of a bill that they already know is going nowhere, that can’t pass the Senate and that if it were to pass the Senate I would veto. They know it.”

The Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) threw the ball back in Obama’s court after the bill’s passage, however, saying “while the House acted today to provide targeted and narrow funding to meet urgent needs at our southern border, it is ultimately up to President Obama to end this crisis by reversing his policies that created it.”

House Speaker John Boehner also released this statement in response to the bill’s passage:

The House has just passed a responsible bill to address the humanitarian crisis at our southern border. It will help secure our border and ensure the safe and swift return of these children to their home countries. If President Obama needs these resources, he will urge Senate Democrats to put politics aside, come back to work, and approve our bill. There are also steps the president can take to address this crisis within the law, and without further legislative action. Every day the president and his party fail to act is another day this crisis continues.

The last thing we need is the government mucking around with news content.

The title of this Big Brother-ish effort by the Federal Communications Commission sounds innocuous enough: “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs.” But it’s a Trojan horse that puts federal officials in the newsroom, precisely where they shouldn’t be.

Don’t take my word for it. The FCC says it wants to examine “the process by which stories are selected,” as well as “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”

Perceived station bias? Are you kidding me? Government bureaucrats are going to decide whether a newsroom is being fair?

Keep in mind that the commission has the power to renew or reject broadcast television licenses. During Watergate, Richard Nixon’s FCC challenged two TV licenses of stations owned by the Washington Post. So mere information gathering can become a little more serious, given that enormous clout.

As FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai notes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, the commission “plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their ‘news philosophy’ and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.” The first test is slated for this spring in Columbia, S.C.

I know that television stations are licensed in the public interest. It’s fair for the FCC to examine how much news a station offers, as opposed to lucrative game shows and syndicated reruns. But the content of that news ought to be off-limits.

The Fairness Doctrine, which once required TV and radio stations to offer equal time for opposing points of view, is no more, and good riddance (since it discouraged stations from taking a stand on much of anything). The Obama administration swears it’s not coming back.

How, then, to explain this incursion into the substance of journalism, which seems utterly at odds with the notion of a free and unfettered press?

Now some of the commentary about this is overheated, with talk of an FCC “thought police” and so on. The effort is beginning in a single city. But already there are signs that the commission is backing off.

Adweek reports that “controversial” sections of the study will be “revisited” under new chairman Tom Wheeler. An FCC official told the publication that the agency “has no intention of interfering in the coverage and editorial choices that journalists make. We’re closely reviewing the proposed research design to determine if an alternative approach is merited.”

The FCC should keep its alternative approaches to itself, as even the posing of these questions carries an intimidation factor. The government has no business meddling in how journalism is practiced. And if George W. Bush’s FCC had tried this, it would be a front-page story.

The only way to stop President Barack Obama from nullifying duly enacted laws is impeachment, says Judge Andrew Napolitano. The problem is, neither Congress nor the American public have the guts for it.

“The president is doing the opposite of what he was elected to do,” Napolitano said Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” Napolitano is a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and a Fox News legal analyst.

When Obama picks and chooses which laws, or portions of them, to enforce, he actually is telling people how to avoid obeying the law, he told Cavuto.

“At some point he is totally frustrating what Congress has written,” Napolitano said.

Republicans have accused Obama of using his executive powers improperly to delay portions of his own healthcare law for political expediency. They also say he has used those powers to enact gun control and immigration rules.

Napolitano said there are 11 million people in the United States who could be deported to their native countries, but Obama has told them, “If you do A, B, C, D, and E, I won’t deport you” — effectively telling them they can break the law and suffer no consequences.

Faced with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and fear of losing the Senate over the unpopularity of Obamacare, the president vowed in January to take more executive action.

Though Sen. Rand Paul sued Obama this week over NSA surveillance, Napolitano said a lawsuit over Obama’s executive actions would be tossed out of court. A judge would tell any member of Congress bringing such a suit to instead begin impeachment proceedings.

But that won’t happen, Napolitano added.

“There’s sort or a cult around him in the Democratic Party that he’s ‘our guy’ and he can do whatever he wants.” he said.

No… you cannot keep your insurance, no matter how much you like it. You also can’t keep your doctor, or your full-time job. Twenty-nine hours a week or less of gainful employment will have to suffice going forward.

And that’s a good thing. Just ask any Democrat — it’s freedom from job-lock. Americans, thanks to Barack Obama, now have the right to be unemployed. I love the smell of progressives in the morning… they smell like… bull@#$&.

Besides, stop your whining, are there not food stamps, acquirable in an instant? How much does he have to do for you people?

Are there not numerous other forms of government largesse, available to you, the downtrodden 99%, beset by such inequality as has never been seen in the annals of recorded history? Why do you need to work? Untying self-esteem from productivity is one of the many gifts of Obamanomics.

What you can keep, however, is your president — for another three tortuous years.

Now, doesn’t that make you happy?

Despite his numerous impeachable offenses, elucidated so perfectly by Andrew McCarthy, impeachment is not on the horizon. The table is not set. The average man, ever evolving, still considers Barack Obama a nice guy, perhaps incompetent and obviously a liar, but not criminal or worse yet… evil.

No, America is stuck with him and his expansive understanding of presidential power and prerogative — for another 3 years.

The good news is that this is the worst-case scenario, 3 years of dear leader, Emperor Barack, his royal highness, will not sound a death knell for America, especially now that no person worldwide takes him seriously.

The Obama administration’s admission that it may extend the exemption for health insurance plans canceled due to Obamacare regulations could signal an end to the war on “junk plans.”

Conservative estimates from the Associated Press put the total of canceled plans at 4.7 million; in contrast, Obamacare exchanges across the country can only claim that 3 million Americans have selected private plans via online exchanges (actual enrollment could reportedly be even lower).

In response to growing outcry over the cancellations, the Obama administration issued an “administrative fix” in November to extend the plans — a move that was rejected by at least 22 states and several private insurance companies as well.

Obama’s original fix was slammed by some states and industry leaders as a last-minute attempt to mitigate the political repercussions of canceling plans, not a practical fix to help those without coverage. Obama’s order came just over a month before Obamacare went live; insurers had already canceled the plans, told customers they’d need new coverage and informed regulators of the changes. Widespread rejection of the plan fixated on it as a political move, not a practical solution.